Ultra slots and Delayed Effect limitation

[athribiristan]

When using a multipower with charges and delayed effect, are you able to use more than one Ultra slot at a time?

 

I have a player creating a rune mage who prepares his runes ahead of time. This requires extra time and uses the delayed effect limitation. Is he able to have multiple powers active at the same time if they are all bought as Ultra slots or should I require that he pay for Multi slots?

[Steve Long]

Re: Ultra slots and Delayed Effect limitation

 

Hmmm. This definitely falls into “I can’t believe this never came up before” territory. I’m going to restate the question a bit more generically to make sure the answer is clear:

 

Q: How does Delayed Effect interact with Power Frameworks? Does “storing” a Delayed Effect power that’s a slot in a Multipower reserve or a Variable Power Pool’s Pool “lock in” the Framework, preventing it from being used for anything else?

 

A: If a slot in a Power Framework has the Delayed Effect Advantage, once a character prepares and “stores” that power according to the Delayed Effect rules he has to keep the Framework allocated to that power. If he switches the Framework to another slot in such a way that the Framework is no longer fully allocated to the stored power, the stored power is lost. (If he’s stored that slot multiple times, he loses all of them.) If the character wants to store the Delayed Effect power again, he has to re-allocate the Framework to it and go through all the preparations again. If the character has multiple Framework slots stored, when he re-allocates the Framework and loses one he can decide which one is lost at that time (he doesn’t have to define this in advance).

 

 

Example: Khalandrian the Mystic is a wizard in a Fantasy Hero campaign where characters are allowed to buy spells in Multipowers. He has a Multipower with a 62-point reserve and four slots: Blast 10d6, Delayed Effect; RKA 3d6, Delayed Effect; Drain STUN 5d6, Delayed Effect; Teleportation 40m, Delayed Effect. Each slot is a Fixed slot and has Concentration, Extra Time, Gestures, Incantations, and Requires A Magic Roll as Limitations. The campaign rules restrict Khalandrian to INT/3 spells he can “store” at any one time, which in his case means eight spells.

 

Khalandrian uses Delayed Effect to “store” his RKA spell. That’s when he realizes he can’t switch the Multipower to another slot without losing his stored RKA. Cursing the Line Developer for not letting him use his Multipower to full effect, Khalandrian makes the best of a bad situation and “stores” the RKA spell seven more times, bringing him to his maximum of eight stored spells.

 

Vorzhan the Arcane is another wizard in the same campaign, but his master made him study The Rules And Their Implications during his apprenticeship. He has the same Multipower and spells as Khalandrian, except that his reserve is 124 points. So he stores the RKA spell and the Teleportation spell, since the reserve is large enough for him to have any two slots active at a time. He stores the RKA five times and the Teleportation spell three times. If he switches the reserve to the Blast or the Drain, he’ll lose either all the stored RKA spells or all the stored Teleportation spells.

 

Later Vorzhan earns enough Experience Points to convert all four of his spell slots into Variable slots and to increase the reserve to 148 points. He decides to store lesser versions of all four of his spells: Blast 6d6; RKA 2d6; Drain 3d6; and Teleportation 30m. That’s four 37-point slots, which fit exactly into his Multipower reserve. He stores the Blast spell two times, the RKA spell three times, the Drain spell one time, and the Teleportation spell two times. However, since he’s used up all of his reserve with these four spells, if he decides to re-allocate the reserve so he can cast a more powerful version of one of the spells (say, RKA 3d6), he’ll lose one of the other stored spells (such as both stored Teleportation spells) to “free up” enough of the reserve.